Mysterium (28 page)

“Maybe not much time left,” Clifford said.

“Maybe not.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

“No.” Then, after a silence, “Or maybe there is. Clifford, this radio scanner.” Howard took it from a kitchen cupboard. “I want you to take it to someone. Dex Graham. I’ll write down his address. Take it to him and show him how it works.”

“Dex Graham,” Clifford repeated.

“And tell him how you and I met. Tell him you need to get out of town, and tell him I said he would help. Can you remember that?”

“Sure,” Clifford said. The prospect of leaving Two Rivers intrigued him; he had not thought it was possible. “But what about you?”

Howard smiled in a strange way. “Don’t worry about me.”

CHAPTER 20

John F. Kennedy High School had closed for the holidays and never reopened. The reasons were both political and practical.

Early in January, the words PROCTORS=MURDERERS were spray-painted across the school’s brickwork where it faced La Salle Avenue. A military patrol arrived in the morning to splash whitewash over the slogan, but the words showed through, baleful and ghostly. The Proctors declared the school a property of the Bureau de la Convenance and welded a chain across the doors.

The gesture was largely symbolic. Parents had agreed among themselves that the risk of sending their children to school was not worth taking any longer. Anything might happen to children out of sight; the evidence of that had been ample. Besides, what were they learning? Ancient history. To what end? None.

Evelyn had copied some of Symeon Demarch’s written dispatches in her careful longhand. Dex passed them on to Shepperd in exchange for more information on the planned escape.

The plans were reasonably credible. All the military traffic moved on a north–south route that connected with the highway and led back to Fort LeDuc—obviously not a viable way out. But during the invasion in June a tank battalion had come in from the west along a seldom used corduroy road through the forest. Shepperd’s scouts had established that this largely unguarded road was a logging trail that led to an evacuated timber camp twenty miles southeast. From there, a larger road led west—presumably toward civilization, but avoiding the bottleneck at what used to be the Mackinac Bridge. There was plenty of tree cover and even a large expedition might go undetected, “Provided we get out relatively clean and the weather’s favorable—say, cloudy but not too snowy. If we land on our feet, a lot of folks are talking about heading farther west, maybe what we would have called Oregon or Washington State. It’s supposed to be kind of a frontier out there. The Proctors are less powerful. Homesteading is a possibility, in the long run.”

He told Dex, “We’ll let you know when the times are final. But it’s close, obviously. You’ll need transportation, extra gasoline, snow tires—chains, if you can get ’em; rope, tools, food. Bob Hoskins says he can help you out on that account. And we prefer a fully occupied vehicle; we have more refugees than cars. If you don’t have at least three passengers, come to me; there’s a waiting list. Tell me, you ever do any shooting?”

Dex said, “In the Reserves. But that was years ago.”

“Still handle a weapon?”

“I suppose so.”

“Then take this.” Shepperd pressed a .38 caliber military pistol into his hand and filled the pocket of Dex’s jacket with spare clips. “I trust you won’t have to use it. But I’m a trusting soul.”

Dex Graham went home to Linneth. The Proctors had recently withdrawn their guards from the civilian wing of the Blue View Motel and it was easier now for her to spend the night.

After dark, blinds pulled, she sat beside Dex on the bed and unbuttoned his shirt. The bullet wound was a pink dimple in the meat of his arm. It was only intermittently painful. She touched it with the palm of her hand in a gesture that was probably unconscious but seemed to Dex full of significance, a healing caress she might have learned from her mother. Maybe a token of the strange religion she had grown up with, Hellenic paganism evolved through centuries of Europe. In London, she said, they still allowed temples in the city. Oracles of Apollo in Leicester Square.

She undressed in the dim light with a combination of modesty and glee that was half Puritan, half pagan. In spite of all the hardship—the arrest of her parents, three years in a gray nunnery in Utica, her long and arduous education—she still owned this hidden liveliness. It ran through her veins like blood.

And it struck a similar chord in Dex. Strange to realize, so close to what was liable to be his death, how much of himself he had lost. Invisibly. He was accustomed to the idea that he had seen the boundaries of the world and that he was lingering here by default, neglected by death for reasons he couldn’t fathom. That belief had made him brave . . . or at least insolent, careless, grim.

But it was an addictive sort of courage. Teflon courage. He had glided through time, adhering nowhere. It was a courage, in any case, not much exercised. He had never been called on to face down a tank, like the murdered students of Tiananmen Square. He was an American and it was still possible, even at the ragged end of the twentieth century, to live a life insulated from evil—any evil but his own.

He had occasionally wondered what evil looked like. It was easy enough to find it on CNN, the bodies in the pits, the death squads in their dusty pickup trucks. But evil face to face: would he cower before it? Or would it have the same stale odor as his own guilt?

But now he
had
seen it. The small bodies hanging outside City Hall were its frank signature. What else to call it but evil? There was nothing to exonerate the hangman, no extenuating circumstances or plausible excuses; only a contrived, practiced cruelty.

And it was
not
frightening. It was offensive, banal, repellent, crude, tragic—everything
but
frightening. It could hurt him, certainly. Kill him. Probably it would. But its face was only the face of the Proctors, self-aggrandizing and completely superficial.

And here was Linneth, its opposite. Her smile repudiated oppression and her touch brought martyrs back to life. Prisons opened with every breath she took.

There was nothing complicated here, he thought, only a doorway with daylight beyond it and an opportunity after all these dry years to step forward and pass through, pass through.

Linneth was with Dex in the morning when the boy came to the apartment.

The boy was an ordinary-seeming child, large eyes under a cascade of unkempt blond hair, but Linneth thought she noticed a hint of recognition from Dex. Odd, because the boy was clearly a stranger: he had come with a strange sort of radio and instruction for its use from Howard Poole.

The boy must be twelve years old or so, Linneth thought. Blue-eyed, like Dex. He looked almost like a relative. Or a son.
Ah.

How many agonizing times had that spark of recognition leaped to strangers? It must be terribly hard for him, she thought.

The boy said Howard had promised that Dex would help him when it was time to leave Two Rivers.

“Of course,” Dex said.

“And my mother,” Clifford said. “There’s just the two of us. We have a car, if you need a car. A Honda. There’s even some gas in it.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Dex said. “We have room for two.”

But a darker thought had occurred to Linneth. She said, “Clifford, when did you talk to Howard?”

“Yesterday—just before curfew.”

“You told him about the tower in the forest, you said?”

“The bomb. He already knew about it.”

“And he gave you the radio and told you to come here?”

“Yes.”

“That sounds very final. Clifford . . . do you think he was getting ready to
go
somewhere?”

Clifford seemed to think it over. “Maybe. He had a big winter coat by the door. A backpack next to it. He could have been getting ready to go somewhere.”

And Linneth looked at Dex, who knew at once what this meant.

Dex hurried to the house, but it was empty. The light had been turned off, the kitchen cleaned—a futile but typical gesture—and Howard’s sleeping roll was missing from the basement where Dex had seen it last.

“I didn’t think he would really do this,” Dex said. “It’s suicide. He
knows
that.”

“Perhaps he didn’t feel he had much to lose. Or perhaps he really thought it was a way out.” Linneth shrugged unhappily. “I didn’t know Howard well. But he seemed like a very religious man.”

CHAPTER 21

Because it was Friday night, Lukas Thibault borrowed a car from the motor pool and drove across town to Ellen’s.

It was easier nowadays to borrow a vehicle and find someone to cover for him in the evenings. Not that it wasn’t still dangerous: Nico Bourgoint, newly recovered from his flying-glass injuries at the gas depot explosion, had been stockaded for laying over with a woman from the roadhouse crowd. But Nico had few friends; no one would cover for him. It was a matter of protocol, really. The purely mechanical aspects of an assignation—vehicles, duty rosters—had lately been less problematic. All the commanding officers seemed distracted.

Thibault parked his car in the shadow of Ellen’s garage. The neighbors would know he was here, of course; discretion was only a gesture. But he doubted Ellen spoke often to her neighbors.

She opened the door at his knock, her eyes traveling to the bag that contained a quart of barracks whiskey in a glass jar—the real object of her desire.

She waved him inside. They sat together at the kitchen table. Thibault had grown almost accustomed to the strange unkempt sybaritic luxury of the house, with its broadloom (stained), sleek machines (dusty), glittering countertops (chipped). Still, it struck him every time he crossed the threshold, a dizzy feeling. How mysteriously these people had lived!

He had found Ellen at the roadhouse on the highway not long after the occupation began. The roadhouse had become notorious as the place where a soldier might meet a woman who would barter her virtue for ration coupons. It quickly became a brothel in all but name.

In a sense, Thibault had rescued Ellen from that. She had worked tables there when the roadhouse was respectable and she had been unhappy with the new clientele: crude farmhands, mostly, dragged unwilling from their provincial pigpens. Thibault, who took pride in his Manhattan pedigree, had saved her from an amorous private who was trying to impress her by showing off his glass eye—“the only one-eyed gunner in the Army of God,” though he was more likely to be found on latrine duty than near the artillery. Samael, what an army they had brought here!—battalions of the halt, the lame, the blind.

Thibault had driven Ellen home, his first illicit journey through the town of Two Rivers. She had been grateful. Would he stay the night? He would stay the night. Would he come back? He would come back. Would he bring some food? Of course.

Tonight the boy was away somewhere, which was all right with Thibault. Ellen cooked a desultory supper and advanced directly to the jar of copper-kettle drink-me-down. Her drinking was heavier and faster these winter nights. Too bad. There was something unappetizing about a drunken woman. Not that Thibault was about to turn and leave.

“Clifford’s staying at a friend’s house,” Ellen said. “We have the place to ourselves.” And she ducked her head in a gesture she probably imagined was coquettish.

Thibault nodded.

“That boy,” Ellen said. “His ideas. Luke.” She stroked his cheek. “Are you really going to burn us all up?”

“What do you mean?”

“Digging ditches around the town.
He
says. To keep in the fire. To keep it from spreading.”

She stood and leaned against the kitchen counter. Thibault was not really drunk yet, only a little loose in his skin, as the farmers said. His eyes traced the curve of her hip. She wasn’t young enough to be genuinely beautiful . . . but she was pretty enough.

He was only vaguely alarmed by what she was saying. “A person hears rumors,” he said. “All kinds of rumors . . .”

“A bomb, Cliffy says.”

“Bomb?”

“An
atomic
bomb.”